On April 26, 1986, a series of explosions destroyed the reactor of the fourth energy block at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. This accident was characterized as the biggest technological disaster of the 20th century. Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich (Nobel Prize in Literature 2015), ten years after the "accident", wandered in the forbidden zone - not without a price for her own health - spoke with dozens of people, searched newspaper archives, registries, hospitals, searched for the threads of losses in the former Soviet territory. One hundred of these testimonies constitute this book: men, women, children, villagers, soldiers, students, firefighters, scientists, dying and relatives of the dying, mothers who gave birth to deformed children, students who no longer meet in school but in leukemia units, farmers who were uprooted from the forbidden zone, parents who buried their children, women who saw their husbands melt alive before they died, elders who remember old prophecies, girls who hide their origin because if they reveal it they will not find a partner in life. "Recording them, I had the feeling that I was recording the future," writes Alexievich in her unique testimony in the polyphonic book.

This is the great, as well as heartbreaking masterpiece of Alexievich, one of the most important books of the 20th century, which, after Anne Frank and Primo Levi, redefined the concept of testimonial literature. A bitter book of indescribable darkness, which page by page becomes a gospel of desperate and frenzied love.